


Once Upon a Time

by HungryLibrary



Category: RWBY
Genre: A time when the gang never got together, Gen, Sad, and all the angst that came as a result
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-05-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 17:45:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1656977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HungryLibrary/pseuds/HungryLibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At age seventeen, Weiss Schnee almost attended Beacon Academy for Hunters and Huntresses...</p>
<p>Almost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once Upon a Time

At age seventeen, Weiss Schnee  _almost_  attended Beacon Academy for Hunters and Huntresses.

She had trained for it, studied for it, bargained with her parents from every angle until they conceded to her logic. Four years of fighting Grimm would make her stronger. So would the competition with her peers, graduating from Beacon was an accomplishment that both hunters and civilian’s respected…

Considering their line of business, a Schnee could never have too much respect.

If Weiss’s had her way, though, she would  _not_  be entering into the family trade.

With her new credentials in hand and countless districts clamoring to hired this rising star in the Grimm-slaying world, Weiss would be beyond even her family’s monetary and social chains. She would be Weiss Schnee, free to build whatever grand history for her name that she chose.

When others looked at their weapons they saw fame or riches or the darker part of themselves. When Weiss looked at her blade, she saw the key to her future.

At age seventeen Weiss  _almost_  attended Beacon Academy for Hunters and Huntresses….

But in the end, she went to her father’s funeral instead.

With the head of the Schnee Dust Company dead from a Whitefang assassin’s bullet, who was left to keep everything from falling apart other than his only child and heir?

And so Weiss found herself inheriting the world she had fought so long to escape.

In time she would learn to forget ever having wanted to become a huntress. Her own half-truths about gaining power and prestige would re-write her memory, erasing the thrill of sword work and the empty cold of her childhood.

She would become a true Schnee, just as her family had always wanted.

-

Blake was fourteen when she had her moment of doubt.

It came as the Whitefang friends she had marched with for years broke both windows and a promise of non-violence as they raided a weapon’s warehouse.

Small, fast, and alert, they had placed her outside on guard duty as crates were pried open and the spoils shoved hastily into backpacks. Talk was minimal, but what little Blake did hear was giddy with excitement. Finally, whispered her childhood friend Adam, finally we’ll be able to protect ourselves…

Cat ears flicking nervously, Blake had wondered if this wasn’t a terrible mistake.

The weapons were very real and they were just kids. The whole point of Whitefang was to show humans the needlessness of Faunus discrimination by protesting peacefully. It got bad sometimes, true. People threw more than just words and the police didn’t intervene until after the fact, but wasn’t arming themselves a bit much…?

Then an errant band of Grimm took out six blocks of lower-class Faunus families, killing over forty, and Blake understood. 

Not one of the half-dozen hunters in the city had lifted a finger to help.

Not one out of six human hunters had dared take on the Grimm directly.

One of them even failed to show up until the very end, and meanwhile the others had set up a perimeter, slowly herding the monsters out of city limits so they could be Dust bombed from afar.

They had sacrificed Faunus lives to save humans and property.

Protesting would never work on them, they just didn’t  _care_. Maybe they weren’t even capable of caring.

Which meant the Faunus would have to help themselves.

Even the kids, even those like Blake who didn’t want war or violence- Everyone needed to be armed and ready, because that was the only way to keep their people from being gradually driven to extinction.

Blake was fourteen when she had her moment of doubt.

But from that moment to the day an investigator traced the bullet and the Schnee took their revenge, she never again questioned the ever more radical actions of her Whitefang fellows. Or herself.

-

Fifteen year old Yang couldn’t stop running.

Two days at most she stayed in each city before moving on. No hotel rooms, she didn’t have the money anyway, just out on the streets where the only way to be found was if someone physically bumped into you.

She had a goal, but it wasn’t the sort you could ever reach and sit down at. Keep moving. Keep going. Keep out of sight and above all else-

Don’t look back.

There wasn’t a city in remnant without some sort of underground fighting ring. Yang got good at sniffing them out, she got even better at playing the ditzy blonde to up the odds against her, right before beating her opponent to the floor.

It was hard work that eventually started bringing in some hard cash. Betting on yourself was very profitable when you didn’t lose…

And Yang couldn’t lose. Not when she looked at the guy across the ring and pictured him with the face of Summer Rose, someone she was furious for ever having called  _mom_.

Ruby had called her mom, too.

Now Ruby was dead because of her.

Because of Yang as well. There was no way of denying it, she should have watched Ruby better. She should have found her first or kept her from leaving-

But Ruby wouldn’t have run off in the first place if it wasn’t for Summer Rose.

If she hadn’t had those nightmares, if their mom’s work as a huntress hadn’t terrified her so much, Ruby wouldn’t have panicked that day and run straight into those Grimm. Her corpse wouldn’t have needed to be  _stitched back together_  for the open casket viewing.  

It was Summer’s fault for scaring Ruby into the streets and then not being there in time to save her.

Yang had been fourteen years old when she lost her little sister and left behind the people she’d once called family. A year later she hadn’t stopped running. She probably never would.

-

Ruby Rose at twelve dreamed of fighting Grimm.

Blurs of black and white filled her nights. The only other color was red, bright red falling in showers or jetting up in spurts as sharp steel bit and hacked and hewed. Scarlet flowers that blossomed with the crack and impact of gunfire…

She knew what battlefields looked like thanks to the historical section of the library. She poured over pictures of dead Grimm in zoology books, and had seen the wicked tears in her mother’s skin when a worn out Summer Rose changed her bandages at the kitchen table.

At night Ruby slew Grimm by the hundreds. In the morning she stayed in bed long after waking up, eyes tight shut and paralyzed with fear that this time Mom  _wouldn’t_  be coming home-

Sometimes she didn’t.

Some days were filled with frantic calls and skipping school so they could rush to the hospital. Sometimes Mom didn’t come home for weeks and dad’s smile started to look like it had been glued on to cover a permanent frown.

Ruby hated those days. She hated her dreams too, because the number of Grimm in them was never-ending, just like in real life.

She wanted to kill them all.

She collected weapons magazines and studied them until she could draw all the most basic models from heart. Then she combined them. Blades and gun barrels were fused together in ways that were so over the top Ruby couldn’t fault Yang for thinking they were robots.

The designs were useless but Ruby loved drawing them.

Someday, Ruby promised herself, someday I’ll build a proper weapon of my own and team up with Mom. We’ll hunt Grimm across Remnant until there isn’t a single one left, and then no one will have to be sacred anymore.

Ruby Rose at twelve was garbage at fighting.

That didn’t stop her from grabbing up the sawed off broom handle that served for her practice spear, and charging into the thick of things when news came of rouge Grimm in the city.

She had left before Mom could. She would deal with the Grimm herself before Summer Rose even got a glimpse of them, use her speed and better planning abilities to turn the monsters against themselves, like the heroes in her books always did…

It was just like in her dreams.

The black blurs racing towards her, the white claws caching at Ruby’s shirt-

And the red, bright and gleaming, as it splashed into the sky.

Ruby spilled plenty of blood that afternoon. Sadly enough, all of it was her own.

-

Someday the president of the Schnee Dust Company will visit the unmarked grave where her father’s killer, a cat Faunus, bad been buried.

She will lay flowers on the grave. She will accept that her father’s death, though terrible and painful to her still, brought more good to Remnant than the man himself ever did.

After a spare few minutes her secretary, a rabbit Faunus whose ears had been lopsided ever since the last attempt on Weiss’s life, will glance pointedly at the time. Weiss will turn to follow with a twisted smile, funny to think a Schnee now obeyed the commands of people she was once famous for oppressing-

As she walks away Weiss will see another visitor paying their respects.

The woman, for she is most certainly a woman despite the shortness of her golden hair, will sit with her back to a well-tended grave, eyes closed as if she meant to dose off in the sunshine.

Perhaps she feels Weiss’s gaze, for she will blink suddenly awake and return the stare with eyes cold and red as dying coals.

After a moment the woman will nod very slightly.

Weiss will return the gesture without breaking her stride, and let the memory of the stranger linger in her mind long after she has been shepherded from the cemetery.

A week later, when the hired investigator became the one to discover the body of Yang Xaio Long, apparently dead from suicide- Weiss would be startled at her own feelings of loss.

She had never spoken to the woman. Nor was she the sort to go hunting out new friends. The urge to track her down had been just that, a flight of fancy that someone in her position of power was at full liberty to indulge.

And yet she would buy a plot next the grave the woman had been visiting, and she would visit them both every year, just as she did for Whitefang assassin.

Some would say it was a great effort to go through for strangers, but Weiss had no other obligations beyond her work, and so the visits were easily fitted in to her schedule.

Pitiful, she sometimes thought as she went from grave to grave. You must the loneliest person of all, Weiss Schnee, when the dead are the only ones you ever put an effort into seeing regularly.

She would smile her twisted smile and lay flowers upon their stones- flowers befitting the names carved there.

Sunflowers for Yang Xaio Long, whom Weiss could only assume was properly memorialized with the words ‘ _Devoted unto Death_ ’.

Lilies for Blake Belladonna, whose epitaph ‘ _She Brought Shadows to Light_ ’ was carved into her coffin, where it would hopefully remain undisturbed by the less forgiving members of society.

And finally, roses for Ruby Rose….

Hers was the oldest grave, yet it held the youngest body. The main inscription read ‘ _Lovely and Sleeping_ ’ but someone, and Weiss believed she could hazard a very good guess who, had scratched a smaller message just below.

‘Soon May I Follow’

Weiss wondered most about this last grave.

She wondered who young Miss Rose would have grown up to be, would their paths have ever crossed? Would the world have been changed for having her in it just a bit longer..?

Or would everything still be the same, save that Weiss would have two fewer graves to visit. 


End file.
